In 1948, José Figueres Ferrer executed what may be the most original coup d’état in world history. In the aftermath of a stolen presidential election, Figueres, a coffee grower who stood all of five foot three, cobbled together an army of seven hundred irregulars that overthrew Costa Rica’s government. Then, as the leader of the new ruling junta, his first act as commander in chief of the military was to abolish it.
Figueres reasoned that it was easier—and cheaper—to keep the citizenry pacified with schools, health care, and social security than with a standing army ready to suppress internal unrest. On his coffee finca in southern Costa Rica, he’d learned that paying laborers fairly, and providing them medical care and free milk for their children from his dairy, assured him of a loyal workforce. Within a year of his coup he had converted former army barracks to schools, held elections, and stepped down from the interim presidency. A few years later, he was elected democratically, and reelected twice thereafter.
The success of his revolution involved some lucky timing. With a Cold War between world capitalism and world communism incubating, the United States was too preoccupied with a sinking situation in Korea to worry about a Central American backwater. Had Costa Rica happened five years later, post–Korean War, Figueres’s fate might have been that of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, whom the CIA removed in 1954 before his land reforms could expropriate United Fruit Company banana plantations—or that of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, ousted in 1953, also by the CIA, for nationalizing Iran’s oil industry.
By then, Figueres had long since nationalized Costa Rican banks, enfranchised women and black voters, extended health services, and guaranteed higher education throughout the country. The resulting stability was so applauded by labor and business alike that the United States overlooked his suspect populism, especially after Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution. With Soviet money propping up Cuba like a billboard for communism in Latin America, the United States needed one for capitalism, and the most dependable democracy in the region was the obvious choice. In 1961, President Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development, to lavish generosity on countries friendly to U.S. interests. USAID’s mission in Costa Rica was one of its biggest, bestowing eight times more foreign aid per capita than anywhere else in Latin America.
It was also among the first places where the United States sent contraceptives. At the time, Costa Rica had one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, with families averaging between seven and eight children. Thanks to the improved public health care Figueres instituted, most were now tending to survive—a blessing that resulted in an unexpected explosion of numbers. America’s foray into family planning abroad, like its policy of buying foreign friendship, was not without controversy. The pills that USAID began distributing in Costa Rica in 1966 were the result of drug trials conducted on a Caribbean island that, to this day, still besmirch the cause of reproductive health.
In 1934, the United States began its first governmental birth control program—in Puerto Rico, which Theodore Roosevelt had persuaded his government to keep as spoils of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Roosevelt’s plan for Puerto Rico was a U.S. naval base and coaling station for ships using the canal he dreamed of digging through the Central American isthmus. Eventually, it all came to pass: The Panama Canal made the United States a world economic center, and the biggest American naval base, on Puerto Rico’s eastern shore, helped make it a world military power.
Unlike the transcontinental country to which it now belonged, Puerto Rico was an island only a hundred miles long and thirty-five miles wide, without much room for its population to expand. Yet it was doing so anyway. Beginning the nineteenth century with a hundred fifty thousand people, Puerto Rico ended it with a million. The acquisition of a small, crowded isle of brown-skinned people who didn’t speak English alarmed more than a few Americans. Although Puerto Ricans would be granted citizenship in 1917—in part to blunt accusations that the United States, born of a revolt against colonialism, was now a colonial power itself—even today they are denied voting in Congress or in national elections.
But Puerto Ricans could be useful. Since World War I, they have been drafted, with many dying in U.S. foreign wars. During World War II, Puerto Rican soldiers were experimentally sprayed with mustard gas to see if they were more resistant than Caucasians. And in the 1950s, Puerto Rican women became human lab mice for testing birth control pills that later were sent to Costa Rica—although by then, with only one-third of the estrogen and one-hundredth of the progesterone of those used in the Puerto Rican trials.
Scores of Puerto Rican women taking the original high-dosage pills experienced nausea, dizziness, headaches, blurred vision, bloating, or vomiting. Some suffered blood clots and strokes. The ones who died were never autopsied. None, it has been widely reported, had been informed that, except for a short trial in Boston, the new medication from G. D. Searle and Company wasn’t field-tested—nor that they were the test. They were simply told that the tablets prevented pregnancy.
When the truth emerged, no one was particularly surprised. Puerto Rican women had already been subjected to what, until Zyklon B started hissing out of Nazi showerheads, was the most sweeping policy ever based on eugenics, a pseudoscientific distortion of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, eugenics was taught in hundreds of European and American universities, including Harvard and Yale. Among its advocates were Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, breakfast cereal magnate J. H. Kellogg, several Scandinavian governments, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Although Darwin himself was not a proponent, his son Leonard presided over the First International Congress of Eugenics, held in London.
The term eugenics is attributed to Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, a scientist who claimed a biological rationale for Britain’s ruling classes: namely, superior genes. This assertion soon broadened into a theory of social and economic survival of the fittest called Social Darwinism. Its purported scientific logic reassured elites that some races, especially their darker-skinned colonial subjects, were inferior to others. In America, eugenics became the pretext for legitimized prejudice, including anti-miscegenation laws in several states. It spawned organizations such as Kellogg’s Race Betterment Foundation, which promoted the improvement of humanity by careful breeding through racial segregation, lest the gene pool be tainted.
Margaret Sanger’s embrace of eugenics involved not so much qualities to be nurtured as those to be eliminated. Her belief that the “mentally unfit” should be sterilized, conflated with her work to bring contraception to minority groups, made Planned Parenthood suspect of racism and even of plotting genocide against minorities. These charges still surface, even though luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr. were among Sanger’s supporters. Although she had helped secure funding that led to development of the pill and its Puerto Rican field trials, the genocide claim concerned something with which she had little direct involvement: a mass sterilization program in Puerto Rico that began during the 1930s, and which never really ended.
Its messy context was the inept relationship of the anticolonial United States to its colonial possession. Until the late 1940s, every governor of Puerto Rico was an appointed male Caucasian mainlander, who could veto anything passed by its legislature. English was mandatory in federal courts on the island (it still is) and in schools, resulting in Spanish-speaking teachers being required to teach Spanish-speaking students in a language neither understood very well.
The prevailing acceptance of eugenics contributed to the widespread prejudicial notion on the mainland that Puerto Ricans were somehow inferior. Not until Hitler, eugenics’ most ardent devotee, would the criteria of scientists who propounded it be questioned. For years, Harvard genetics students were taught that alcoholism, criminal behavior, and “feeble-mindedness”—a term Margaret Sanger also used—were inherited traits to be rooted out through breeding. According to Harvard science historian Everett Mendelsohn, their textbook stated that “the biologically poorest elements” reproduced faster than “the intellectual and cultural elements.”
Against this stacked deck was the fact that Puerto Rico was becoming seriously overcrowded. By the 1930s, nearly another million had been added. (Like the planet, Puerto Rico’s numbers would quadruple in the twentieth century; its current population, 4 million, doesn’t include 4 million more puertorriqueños living in the mainland United States—to which, as U.S. citizens, they can emigrate freely.) In 1934, with unemployment rising as fast as the population, sixty-seven federally funded birth control clinics were opened on the island through a special Puerto Rican Emergency Relief Fund. With the situation classified as an emergency, doctors were literally encouraged to cut with surgical swiftness.
Back then, there weren’t many options for reliable contraception. Margaret Sanger herself imported the first diaphragms and French pessaries—cervical caps—into the United States, in open defiance of the 1873 Comstock Act that outlawed sending “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail. Even condoms were illegal until Sanger finally won court judgments acknowledging their role in preventing disease (sadly, too late to benefit U.S. World War I servicemen, who had the highest gonorrhea and syphilis rates among Allied forces). Sanger, an Irish-American Catholic whose mother died at forty after eleven children and multiple miscarriages, was a nurse and reformer for women’s rights. Each time she went to jail, Sanger amassed more support for her contraceptive cause—but those supporters also included eugenicists, appalled at how “the unfit” were multiplying.
In several U.S. states, tubal ligation—severing or blocking a woman’s Fallopian tubes—was allowed for enforced sterilization on alleged mental defectives, criminals, and others deemed genetically unsuitable, including people born with physical impairments. In Puerto Rico, sterilization was considered simpler and more reliable than the prophylactic or barrier devices Sanger eventually got legalized. It was usually performed postpartum, to insure that a woman’s latest pregnancy would be her last. Routinely, however, she wasn’t told that it was permanent. (According to women’s groups against imposed sterilization, the euphemism getting your tubes tied implied that the procedure was reversible.) Even after the shock of Hitler curtailed the American eugenics movement,1 the program in Puerto Rico grew. By the mid-1960s, according to numerous studies, more than one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age had been sterilized—ten times the mainland rate. To put that in perspective: In 1977, when a coercive mass sterilization program in India tumbled the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the figure was 5 percent.
Today in Puerto Rico, the phrase la operación remains synonymous with sterilization. However, even as feminists and Puerto Rican independentistas alike cite it as proof of the colonial power’s racism and sexism, the reaction of most Puerto Rican women has been simply to shrug. For decades now, they mostly live in cities, want jobs, and want to stop having children after two—or even fewer: Puerto Rico’s fertility rate has now dropped to 1.62 children per woman. A tubal ligation is easier than getting men to wear condoms, or keeping track of—or having to buy—birth control pills. Despite abuse investigations that eventually led to sterilization guidelines on both the island and the mainland, by the 1980s the percentage of puertorriqueñas who had la operación climbed past 45 percent, the highest in the world. Among Puerto Rican women wherever they live, says anthropologist Iris Lopez, “It is now a tradition.”
As Ronald Reagan would note with wonder when he first visited Latin America as president, “They’re all different countries down there.” Latin American tastes toward family planning vary by locale, and Costa Rica, unlike Puerto Rico, wasn’t the USA’s colony, but its billboard. A bludgeon approach to population control by foisting tubal ligations on independent Costa Rica would have been no way to treat a poster country.
“In fact,” says Hilda Picado, tapping her desk with brown-rimmed rectangular glasses, “sterilization was a titanic struggle here. A doctor had to agree the need was urgent. The husband’s permission was required. And it was only allowed if a woman already had three children.” A 1998 law finally gave Costa Rican women the right to choose it for any reason. But in a country where Catholicism is still the official state religion, reproductive rights were won in slow increments.
Hilda Picado is director general of the national Asociación Demográfica Costarricense. Her office is in a pastel condominium in La Uruca, a former coffee finca in Costa Rica’s central highlands northeast of the capital, San José. Two generations ago, San José was small enough that the aroma from mounds of coffee beans in the central market pervaded much of the city. Then, the children of Costa Rican women, who had been reproducing faster than almost anyone else on Earth, reached adulthood and spawned their own families. San José soon engulfed ten surrounding villages, including La Uruca, and now smells mainly of diesel and damp concrete.
Hilda Picado’s father was one of twelve. Two of her uncles also had twelve. “Twelve wasn’t that many. I knew families with sixteen, eighteen, twenty.” Picado, born in 1960, was one of six. Her mother would have had more, but toward the end of the 1960s, two things happened.
The first, in 1966, was USAID’s infusion of birth control pills into the clinics that President Figueres built, along with money to develop the organization Hilda now directs.
It was no coincidence that this occurred shortly after the Second Vatican Council ended. Convened by Pope John XXIII early in his five-year papacy, Vatican II was intended to modernize Catholic Church practices. It permitted vernacular language in the previously all-Latin Mass, embraced ecumenism, unveiled women, and was widely welcomed as refreshing spiritual renewal. Many Catholic intellectuals, theologians, and even clergy believed that, especially with the recent appearance of birth control pills, a major shift of church doctrine regarding contraception was now inevitable. The Pope even appointed a commission to study the matter. Although John XXIII died of stomach cancer before the study was completed, momentum for change seemed great; even his more conservative successor, Pope Paul VI, continued Vatican II and expanded the contraception study, and it was widely assumed that the Church’s proscription on birth control would be overturned.
That was especially true in Latin America, where the divergent spirits of Vatican II and the Cuban revolution intersected in a movement called Liberation Theology. Throughout the region, nuns doffed their habits and dressed like the people they served, and priests preached against social and economic injustice. Liberation Theology’s defense of the oppressed especially embraced women. Amid this exhilaration, the introduction of oral contraceptives into Costa Rica and its Latin American neighbors met only token opposition from Catholic clergy.
In 1966, by a 69–10 majority, clerical and lay members of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control voted to annul the church’s prohibition. Five minority members submitted a dissenting opinion, based largely on the writings of a Polish archbishop, Karol Wojtyła, who would later become pope himself. To reverse the proscription on birth control, the dissenters held, would undermine papal infallibility. After both opinions were leaked to the press before any papal action had been taken, an angry Pope Paul VI responded with an encyclical, Humanae Vitae, that sided with the minority.
Humanae Vitae was a shock, but it came too late. By 1968, pills were everywhere. In officially Catholic Costa Rica, even the Ministry of Health distributed them, through its new Office of Population. The popularity of its family-planning program was aided by the second thing that dissuaded Hilda Picado’s mother from having more children: a message coming over the radio into the Picados’ kitchen, never heard before on Costa Rican airwaves.
“Let’s not be embarrassed to discuss what God wasn’t embarrassed to create,” it said.
It was church-sanctioned sex education programming, including information about how to acquire and use birth control. But the clergy behind the broadcasts weren’t Catholic: after Humanae Vitae, priests or nuns who counseled their flocks to use contraception did so at peril of excommunication.
“It was los evangélicos!” recalls Hilda Picado, beaming. They were Pentecostals, Baptists, Wesleyans, Methodists, Moravians, Mennonites, Presbyterians, and others that had banded together to form the Evangelical Costa Rican Alliance, after José Figueres’s peaceful coup. With this united front against anti-Protestant pressure from the official Catholic Church, their hope was to gain space for alternatives in the new Costa Rica. Even before the pill, they had spotted and begun to exploit their adversary’s weakness.
By the early 1960s, evangelical “Good Will Caravans” roamed the country, spreading contraceptive advice and even offering vasectomies along with the Gospel. When birth control pills became available, they included that information with the other good news on their radio programs and helped the government distribute them. God, they assured listeners, loved them for wanting to have the number of children they could comfortably support. No one was going to hell, nor even had to ask forgiveness for something so reasonable. Having fewer children, they said, meant a better chance to escape poverty. By stressing that preventing pregnancy in the first place was the best way to avoid having an abortion, they beat the Catholics at their own game.
“The Bible gives you the freedom to decide what to do with your own life,” says Hilda Picado, a Jehovah’s Witness. To explain in part Costa Rica’s incredible reversal in fertility rates—from 7.3 children per family in 1960 to 3.7 by 1975, to 1.93 by 2011—and the reason why nearly all of Latin America is approaching replacement rate, she points to the simultaneous defection rate of Catholics who have joined evangelical sects in the last fifty years: By some estimates, Latin America will have a Protestant majority before the end of this century.
Picado is currently battling conservative Catholic groups like Opus Dei to legalize the morning-after pill. “You need a backup if whatever you’re using fails. Condoms break, or sperm spills over. Women forget to take a pill. Most important, women who get raped need it.”
Without it, she reminds opponents, the only other backup is abortion, which is illegal in Costa Rica, and which neither Picado nor her organization supports, even though they’re part of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She cites a 2007 study that estimates twenty-seven thousand annual illegal abortions in Costa Rica. As everywhere, they account for more emergency hospitalizations than nearly anything except traffic accidents.
“The more family planning, the less abortion. That truth is as simple as the existence of water.” She’s proud that her country was the first in Latin America after Cuba to reach replacement rate. She’s proud that her church supports her work. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses, she says, aren’t having children at all, taking environmental destruction and rising world tensions as signs of the End Times. Contraceptives make it easy to wait to have their families after the eternal resurrection on Earth commences.
“It’s a religion that makes sense, not one that emotionally jerks you around.”
Five hours south of San José, Gretchen Daily stands in a coffee field just above the Panamanian border, afraid to move, because the pregnant fruit bat hanging from her forefinger has clearly fallen asleep, and Gretchen doesn’t want to wake her. “Hey, guys, how long am I supposed to stand here?” she asks her two Stanford graduate students seated at a nearby white plastic field table.
Chase Mendenhall and Danny Karp, headlamps trained over the specimens they’re measuring with calipers, grin at each other and don’t answer.
It’s an hour after dusk. Costa Rican researchers and more Stanford biology students are bringing in the catch from twenty mist nets they set out twice a day: at 4:30 a.m. to trap birds, and at dusk for bats. The gossamer nets, twelve meters long, woven of black polyester thread the thickness of a human hair, are invisible before sunrise and after sunset. The students string them like phantom volleyball nets from bamboo poles between the rows of coffee plants, across flyways that connect silhouetted patches of forest that edge the plantation.
This is a pretty good haul, Gretchen sees, as she waits for her bat to awaken. Because it seemed stressed by its entanglement with the mist net, after banding, Chase laid it in the “bat ICU”—a cardboard box containing a hot-water bottle—until it calmed. He then hung it on Gretchen’s finger, but rather than flying off, it swung serenely and dozed off. Meanwhile, from soft cotton bags, the students are handing Chase tent-making bats, broad-nosed bats, orange nectar bats, a pale spear-nosed bat, a Sowell’s short-tailed bat, a tiny insectivorous hairy-legged myotis, and a chestnut short-tailed bat. Once again, no Spix’s disk-winged bat—a beautiful, long-eared, reddish-brown and cream-colored creature that clings to the insides of curled-up heliconia leaves—but they know they’re around: they’ve recorded their calls. There are sixty-one native bat species here—nectar feeders, seed eaters, insectivores, and fruit eaters—but except for isolated ribbons, their forest has been turned to coffee plantations.
This is Coto Brus, a 360-square-mile canton in southern Costa Rica’s Pacific watershed. Until the early 1950s, its jungles were barely touched by humans, other than indigenous Guaymí hunters. Then, several Italian families who’d lost their farms in World War II were offered homestead grants to settle this ostensibly empty land in exchange for declaring loyalty to Costa Rica, which needed settlers to discourage Panama’s expansion interests.
Within a decade, exploding population was also pushing native Costa Ricans to this remote outpost. Clearing land was the way to stake a claim, and they used the fastest way possible. The dollar and ecological value of precious hardwoods that vanished in smoke during what is remembered as el fosforazo—“the torching”—is incalculable. By the late 1970s, three-fourths of the rainforest was gone. What remained was mostly on slopes too steep to cultivate.
The Stanford researchers are trying to determine how much biodiversity this fragmented countryside still sustains, and whether that biodiversity somehow contributes to the success of the agriculture. If coffee plants closest to the forest turn out to be the healthiest—meaning free of pests such as la broca, a tiny black African coffee-bean borer that recently turned up in Costa Rica—that would suggest that something from the forest is eating them. In Africa, where coffee originates, la broca’s natural predators are tiny wasps; Brazil tried importing them as a natural pest control, but they didn’t thrive there. The fact that Costa Rican coffee has been spared until recently, Gretchen Daily’s team surmises, may be due to any of several small insectivorous birds—rufous-capped warblers, slaty-and pale-breasted spinetails, or tropical gnat-catchers—that reside in thin bands of remaining forest in the most rugged parts of this green landscape. Or it may be these bats: in the coming weeks, Danny Karp will spend most of his waking hours collecting and preserving bat and bird guano from plastic sheets laid below the mist nets, carefully noting which species hanging in the mesh corresponds to which pile of poop, which he and laboratory techs back at Stanford will then analyze for la broca DNA.
This is a lot of work. Chase has a study under way to quantify the benefits from single trees still standing in farmers’ fields. By her own description, Gretchen nearly went blind one year here at a microscope, trying to distinguish some six hundred species of local native bees by minute differences in how hairs grow on their heads. Since no one here can keep European honeybees anymore since they turned lethal after crossing with African killer bees, she was searching for possible native pollinators.
Eventually she found twenty bee species with coffee blossom pollen on their bodies. All live in the forest and don’t like to fly very far from it. When she and her team explained in agricultural extension offices that they were testing whether Costa Rica’s most important commercial crop, coffee, depended on the number of bees available to transfer pollen, they were told that of course it didn’t: modern cultivars are self-pollinating, and don’t need help from insects. Daily, whose thick blond hair and jogger’s frame belie the fact that she’s in her late forties, took this assertion that pollination is irrelevant as the latest government malarkey she’s heard throughout her career in various countries, including her own. Recent research she’d seen suggested that coffee yields were lowest in tropical countries with the least amount of rainforest left. Since wherever coffee grows in the Americas was previously rainforest, she had a hunch that the difference might be due to missing pollinators.
So they’ve counted the beans harvested from dozens of individual coffee bushes at varying distances from the forest patches. “We’ve found that yields from bushes adjacent to rainforest were 20 percent higher than plants a kilometer away,” she says, as the fruit bat dangling from her index finger finally stirs and flaps back into the night. “For one farm, the difference the rainforest made added up to $60,000 per year.”
Next came seeing whether birds as well as bees also help agriculture, and now they’ve added bats. Besides continual netting and banding, the bird research has included years of pinpointing the range of local species by using false eyelash glue to attach radio transponders the size of an M&M onto 250 of them—including tiny ones like white-ruffed and blue-crowned manakins, which weigh around a third of an ounce.
The reason for taking all these pains is that Gretchen Daily and her colleagues at Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology believe that the future of biodiversity will be determined by what happens in agricultural countrysides across the Earth’s tropics. In a world where 40 percent of the nonfrozen landmass is either cultivated or grazed, there is logic in this idea. However, to many conservationists, suggesting that human-altered ecosystems can support biodiversity is sacrilege.
“Whenever we publish a paper,” says Daily, “some reviewer calls it dangerous, or ‘highly emotional.’ We’re told that as conservationists, we’re supposed to be concentrating on saving the rarest of the rare.”
She has no objection to anyone’s efforts to do that. Unfortunately, however, “rarest of the rare” often means functionally extinct—species such as California condors, with so few individuals left they no longer play a role in the ecosystem. In the meantime, every species that still does play a role is clinging ever more precariously to the planet where they make their living. Ensuring that they still can has her attention now, especially since one of those species is her—our—own.
Besides, she is used to controversy. She springs from a veritable royal academic lineage of it.
Gretchen Daily came to her life’s work through a case of mistaken identity. In the mid-1980s, she was a junior at Stanford, still sampling majors and needing a job to make tuition. A posting caught her eye; a professor named Paul Ehrlich was hiring people to check data entries for his research. Gretchen recognized the name—or so she thought. The daughter of a U.S. army doctor, she had grown up partly in Germany, where the federal agency that regulates vaccines and medicines is the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. She wasn’t aware that its namesake founder, who won a Nobel Prize for developing chemotherapy, had been dead since 1915.
She took the job, and found that it was a different Paul Ehrlich. This one was a lanky, joking biologist who handed her thousands of records dating back to 1959 of checkerspot butterfly catches he’d made in Colorado, which she was to verify for accuracy. It turned out to be easy work, as Professor Ehrlich had entered everything correctly. But she was intrigued by his meticulous investigation, how data accumulating over time revealed fascinating detail about these beautiful insects and the mountains they inhabited.
She switched her major to biology and gradually became acquainted with her boss. She soon learned that while butterfly populations were his passion, he was better known—notorious, by some accounts—for his forays into the ecology of human population. After reading Extinction, the latest book he’d written with his wife, Anne, that connection made perfect sense to Gretchen. Its preface, written as a parable, had become as famous within ecology circles as The Population Bomb was to the outside world.
It imagined a passenger who notices a mechanic popping rivets from the wing of the airplane he’s boarding. The mechanic explains that the airline gets a great price for them. But it’s no problem, he assures the aghast passenger: with thousands of rivets, the plane surely won’t miss a few. In fact, he’s been doing this for a while, and the wing hasn’t fallen off yet.
The point is that there’s no way to know how many missing rivets is one too many. To the passenger, it’s insane to remove even one. Yet, the Ehrlichs noted, on the spaceship called Earth, humans were popping them with increasing frequency. “An ecologist can no more predict the consequences of the extinction of a given species than an airline passenger can assess the loss of a single rivet.”
As Gretchen Daily came to understand, one reason why Paul Ehrlich was obsessed with butterflies was that, like birds, they were valuable environmental indicators, because they’re easy to identify and sensitive to changes—especially changes caused by humans. Sooner or later, the changes affecting butterflies would be affecting the humans as well.
Ehrlich invited her to the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab field station near Crested Butte, Colorado, where he and Anne went every summer. They lived in cabins in a 9,500-foot alpine valley flanked by ridges only briefly free of snow, and rose at dawn to track birds and checkerspots flitting among groves of spruce and quaking aspen, and in meadows filled with sunflowers, bluebonnets, yellow glacier lilies, and purple larkspur. In the evening, Gretchen joined them and Paul’s best friend, a bearded UC-Berkeley engineer and physicist named John Holdren, who was writing a book on energy, and his biologist wife, Cheri, over dinners of trout that Holdren and Anne Ehrlich caught while Paul and Cheri were catching butterflies.
Gretchen, dazzled by the minds discoursing across the table, contributed pies she made with local apples and cherries and her rapt, shy attention. She was disarmed by these gifted people: Paul, tall and black-haired, so solicitous and adoring of the wife he towered over; John Holdren with his intelligent gaze; Anne and Cheri’s glowing skin that to Gretchen reflected inner brilliance. Cheri was writing a book on environmental toxins; Anne, who never finished her degree when the birth of their daughter intervened, had published so many papers and books that she’d earned two honorary doctorates. They were all so healthy, fun, relaxed, and made so much imaginative sense that Gretchen wanted to become like them.
In 1969, a year after The Population Bomb appeared, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren had responded in the journal BioScience to a frequent objection to the book: that modern technology would surely solve the shortages of food, water, energy, and sea harvests that Paul and Anne Ehrlich had predicted if population kept growing.
Holdren contributed math projecting an alarming tonnage of synthetic fertilizer that would be needed indefinitely to feed ever-expanding human civilization, and its inevitable chemical consequences. He calculated that nuclear plants, then touted as the answer to the future, would run out of uranium long before the world could be powered by atomic energy.
He also mentioned a fact largely unnoticed in the 1960s: atmospheric CO2 had risen 10 percent since the beginning of the century. Factoring that news with soaring energy demand and waste heat that power plants generate, including the ones in vehicles, he and Ehrlich calculated that in less than a century, the Earth would be looking at drastic, if not catastrophic, climatological changes.
Over the next two years, Ehrlich and Holdren wrote eighteen articles for the national magazine Saturday Review, discussing the fallout of overpopulation in lay language. They boiled human impact on the environment down to a single expression, multiplying the number of people by their consumption level and by the technology needed to produce whatever they were consuming. The resulting equation, simple enough for anyone to understand, is now a standard in ecology:
I=PAT
(impact = population X affluence X technology)
In 1977, with Anne Ehrlich they published a textbook called Ecoscience. At 1,051 pages, it was a compendium of how the planet’s land, sea, and atmosphere interact. To the Ehrlichs’ biological research, John Holdren added hard numbers and expertise in energy to estimate what it might take for humanity to forge a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature. Ecoscience showed how quickly resource levels were changing, and projected how long it might take civilization to change course. It speculated how fast technology needed to evolve to maintain a decent standard of living if human numbers kept surging.
It was a hugely comprehensive, successful textbook, but it also became known beyond academia because of its analysis of how runaway population growth might be slowed. As scientists, the authors had researched every theoretical possibility ever broached. Three decades later, some of them would be selectively resurrected when President Barack Obama appointed Holdren as his science advisor.
Holdren’s attackers disregarded the fact that in the same sentence that discussed adding a human sterilant to drinking water supplies or staple foods, he and the Ehrlichs rejected it as horrifying to the public and to themselves. Another option envisioned 30-year contraceptive capsules to be inserted in women at puberty, removable “with official permission, for a limited number of births.” Acknowledging how chilling this was, the authors reiterated why they were raising such repellent conjectures: Unless current trends in birth rates were reversed, some countries might soon resort to compulsory birth control.
A year after Ecoscience’s publication, China announced its one-child policy.
An inserted contraceptive capsule, the Ehrlichs and Holdren allowed, might be acceptable if it could be removed whenever a woman chose, then replaced after childbirth. This would solve what many family planners call the biggest problem of all: the fact, as studies even today show, that around half of all pregnancies are unintended.
“Unwanted births and the problem of abortion would both be entirely avoided,” they wrote. But, they added, the logistics of keeping the entire female population on a continual steroid dosage rendered this contraceptive prospect prohibitive as well. Nevertheless, in 1983, Norplant, a hormonal-releasing capsule worn up to five years beneath the skin of the upper arm, would appear. Along with several others, it is still used widely.
Holdren and the Ehrlichs considered legal bases for population laws. As the U.S. Constitution balances individual rights with a society’s compelling interests, they noted, a mandated limitation on family size might be no more unreasonable than requiring men to serve in the military. But, they correctly guessed, the reaction to this opinion among conservatives who advocate both minimal government intervention in people’s lives and robust national defense would be outrage.
“Compulsory control of family size,” they concluded, anticipating the outcry, “is an unpalatable idea, but the alternatives may be much more horrifying.”
So much so, they warned, that conceivably someday people might actually demand such control. Before scarcity and civil order devolved into food riots and water wars, “A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the milder methods of influencing family size preference, while redoubling efforts to ensure that the means of birth control are accessible to every human on Earth within the shortest time possible.”
John Holdren went on to a chair at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and to become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He shared in the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize, for which he gave the acceptance lecture. His appointment as Obama’s science advisor occurred early enough, when Obama enjoyed a Senate majority and the opposition had yet to shape its paralyzing strategy, to assure confirmation. During his hearing, in reply to a Republican senator, he stated that he did not believe in forced sterilization or any coercive form of population control.
He also responded to an issue raised at the end of Ecoscience. He and his coauthors had imagined a superagency they dubbed a “Planetary Regime,” which might one day combine the UN’s environmental and population programs and expand the UN treaty called the Law of the Sea to manage all natural resources. It would be a steward of the global commons, empowered to control pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, and transboundary waters. Such an agency, they added, also “might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world.”
In his confirmation, Holdren testified that he did not believe that determining optimal population is a proper role of government.
The title they gave the superagency became fodder for Obama foes seeking proof that his administration belonged to a world socialist conspiracy. After someone broadcast quotes from Ecoscience on the Internet, Paul and Anne Ehrlich responded to the out-of-context selections of their views and those of their former colleague:
“We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described—but not recommended—in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.”
During Gretchen Daily’s second summer at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, while she and Paul Ehrlich hiked back one afternoon after a day of tallying mating butterflies, they spotted a male red-naped sapsucker, a small western North American woodpecker, chiseling a rectangular patch of bark from a willow, then drinking the sugary sap that flowed down the exposed bare surface. Surrounding branches were pocked with other sap wells, indicating that sapsuckers regularly feasted there.
The next time Gretchen returned, she found an orange-crowned warbler and two kinds of hummingbirds imbibing at the sap well. Further observation—more than fifty hours’ worth, at her mentor’s encouragement—revealed forty species of birds, insects, squirrels, and chipmunks feeding off the sapsuckers’ labor.
Over the summer, intricate dynamics of alpine ecology revealed themselves to her. Sapsuckers needed willows to nourish themselves and their young, and a surrounding aspen grove for shelter. They also depended on a heartwood fungus that rots aspen trunks, enabling them to peck nesting cavities. Willow, aspen, and fungus had to occur together for sapsuckers to be there. To confirm, Daily and Ehrlich surveyed thirteen thousand quaking aspens at varying distances from willows: those that bore telltale sapsucker holes were the closest ones. They also examined all the willows: those far from aspens were unscathed by sapsuckers.
The sapsuckers, in turn, provided a significant source of food to a host of other animals. Since they drilled a new nest hole each year, their former homes were used by seven other bird species that couldn’t dig their own, including two kinds of swallows that appeared only where sapsuckers were present. An entire community of plants and animals all depended on a complex of keystone species: sapsucker, aspen, willow, and fungus. Take away any, and the others would decline or disappear.
This interdependence among plants, birds, insects, and mammals resulted in Daily’s first professional publication, coauthored with Ehrlich, just as she was starting her master’s degree. It was the beginning of her understanding of how losing a single species could touch off a cascade. After a year back in Germany to look at acid rain’s effect on Bavarian forests, she returned to Stanford to begin a doctorate, joining the Ehrlichs at their other perennial research site, the Las Cruces Biological Station in Coto Brus, Costa Rica.
It was the perfect place, Paul told her, for documenting what happens to wildlife when forests go. The massive bee study that kept Gretchen chained to a microscope for many months was led by Ehrlich and his own mentor, Charles D. Michener of the University of Kansas, the world’s greatest living bee authority.2 Besides confirming that forest bees pollinated farmers’ crops, something else surprising had turned up: Bee populations were actually thriving in the cleared spaces. So, Ehrlich had discovered, were butterflies and moths.
Possibly, they reasoned, this was because flying insects easily move between altered landscapes and where they actually live. Over the following years, they looked at less-mobile reptiles, amphibians, and nonflying mammals. They tracked and trapped frogs, toads, snakes, lizards, anteaters, pygmy squirrels, opossums, sloths, pacas, long-tailed weasels, puma, ocelots, river otters, and two species of monkeys. With all these, too, they found a higher capacity than expected of farmed countryside to sustain even threatened and endangered species.
The key in every case, they finally realized, was linked to trees. Wherever farmers left some standing, biodiversity hung on.
Not that a human-worked landscape was any substitute for native forest: Seven species—jaguar, tapir, white-lipped peccaries, howler and spider monkeys, giant anteaters, and an aquatic opossum—had disappeared. But a huge portion of the world’s land was now being used by people, and they were seeing that countryside that still contained some native vegetation cover could support a surprising percentage of native fauna. Such land could still provide services that humans needed: it could hold and filter water, replenish soil, and harbor creatures that pollinate crops and control pests.
Many scientists, they knew, would protest, contending that this conclusion could harm the worldwide conservation movement’s efforts to preserve remaining wilderness habitat for precious species. But the tiny percentage of the planet in nature reserves alone could only save a fraction of the world’s biodiversity. The concept of conservation had to be enlarged to include nonreserve lands as well. The challenge was convincing people who lived there that it was in their interest to coexist with whatever else still did, too.
In 1992, Gretchen Daily took a postdoctoral fellowship at Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group with John Holdren. She needed to learn about energy: The modern agriculture that was transfiguring the land ran on the same fuels that stoked the planet’s engines of urbanity. The vast fertilized monocultures of the Green Revolution, where no trees were left standing—no anything but the cash crop—turned oil into food but failed to compost the carbon released in that chemical exchange.
At Berkeley, Holdren had her look at the converse: could agriculture grow fuel? Under the decade’s new watchword, sustainability, if living plants rather than their fossilized ancestors were the feedstock for the hydrocarbons that civilization now depended on, each new plant generation would inhale the CO2 released by the last one when burned. Theoretically, their carbon contributions to the atmosphere would zero out. But would they really? How much energy was needed to harvest and refine vegetation into biological fuel? How much would it compete with food production? Did it make sense to raise fuel crops on the same land as food crops? Or if biofuels were restricted to degraded lands, could anything grow there that would produce enough energy to make it worthwhile?
That same year, more than a hundred heads of state and thousands of scientists, activists, journalists, politicians, and emissaries of industry gathered in Rio de Janeiro for UNCED, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Earth Summit, as it became known, was portrayed as the watershed moment that might determine both the fate of the global ecosystem and the survival of the human race.
For two years before the meeting, ferocious parlaying ricocheted among member nations and thousands of entities whose interests were vested in the Earth Summit’s outcome. Besides environmental groups, these included women’s networks, human rights defenders, and religious leaders, from shamans to Vatican curia officials. Fifty of the biggest transnational companies pooled their clout to form the Business Council for Sustainable Development, predicated on hopes that economic growth could proceed unabated if ecological impact declined.
Everything on Earth was on the table—except for one. Despite a declaration by Earth Summit secretary-general Maurice Strong that “either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily, or nature will do this for us, but brutally,” by the time UNCED began, the topic was effectively taboo. Although groups named Population Action International, the Population Institute, and one Paul Ehrlich founded, Zero Population Growth, were among the multitudes in Rio, they were, fittingly, outnumbered.
Detractors, who called them “population controllers,” included developing countries that protested being blamed for the world’s environmental woes, when the real culprit, they insisted, was clearly the runaway consumption of rich nations. They rejected as racist neocolonialism the idea that limiting a poor country’s greatest strength—numbers—could be touted as some sort of solution. Feminists added that women in poor countries were doubly abused: traditionally exploited, then forced to submit to involuntary sterilization or Norplant insertions they couldn’t remove by themselves.
The dilemma for population advocates was that they substantially agreed with the grievances of their accusers, and with their goals. Eliminating poverty, guaranteeing women’s reproductive rights, educating everyone, and social justice for all were aims they saw as crucial to achieving their own. The difference lay in strategy. While population groups believed that letting women control the number of children they bore was the swiftest way to reversing their plight, feminists had run out of patience with waiting for something else, such as wide implementation of family-planning programs, to happen before women had equal rights and opportunities. Anticonsumption groups insisted that the first order of business was to eliminate greed, not more greedy people. Arguments that the path to the success of any of these was to pursue them all simultaneously were lost amid the squabbling.
Their divisions proved useful to the Vatican. Invoking the sanctity of human life, it defended the contention that the world’s poor were victims, not the cause, of ecological degradation. As the Summit’s setting, Brazil, had the largest Catholic population in the world, the Church had considerable leverage in pre-session negotiations, and succeeded in deleting the terms family planning and contraception from UNCED draft agreements.
By the final version, the sole remaining reference to population was a single phrase, calling for “responsible planning of family size, in a spirit of liberty and dignity and in accordance with personal values, taking into account moral and cultural considerations.”
“The Holy See has not attempted to eliminate any wording relating to population, but only to improve it,” the Vatican announced when satisfied.
For the transnational companies that were major funders of the conference, more people meant both cheaper labor and expanding market bases, a point articulated eight years earlier at the 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. To the shock of the host country, Mexico, diligently trying to no longer be the world’s fastest-growing nation, the United States announced it would no longer support UN family-planning programs. Not only did they abet abortion, of which President Reagan’s administration did not approve, the U.S. representative explained, but the more people on the planet, the more consumers for the products of capitalism.
Since the United States was the UN’s biggest funder, and among the original patrons of its contraception programs, it was a policy flip that shook international family planning for years to come. Now, at the Rio Earth Summit, another unexpected reversal was occurring, as the United States stunned everyone by rejecting UNCED’s Convention on Biodiversity, under which every other nation agreed to identify and set aside reserves to protect genetic resources. This time, the U.S. complaint was that a provision for “fair and equitable sharing of benefits” from developing those resources constrained the intellectual property rights of biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical companies to products they might derive from tropical plants.
To American ecologists like Paul Ehrlich, such defiance could not be more perverse. For energy experts like John Holdren, things became even worse. As the eleven-day Earth Summit continued, U.S. president George H. W. Bush stayed in Washington, refusing to participate if another principal UNCED document, the Convention on Climate Change, established specific targets for emission reduction. Once again, every other signatory had agreed to limit CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. A prolonged, rabid debate ensued, led by countries that argued for a valid convention, even if it left the United States in glaring isolation. Ultimately, the rationale prevailed that any accord was meaningless without the world’s most powerful country and biggest polluter. The pact was diluted to meet U.S. demands, and the day before the conference ended, Bush arrived in Rio.
“The American way of life is not negotiable,” he said when he addressed the gathering.
The 1992 Earth Summit confirmed that only one species, H. sapiens, had a vote in deciding the fate of the Earth, as it was the only species at the table. In the long run, that vote will be meaningless: insects and microbes will likely have the last laugh, if they laugh at all.
The question, however, is when, exactly, is the long run? No one who has tried to predict that with any precision has been right thus far. Nevertheless, the failure of seers, or of skewed interpretations of Nostradamus or of Mayan calendars, should not lull anyone into complacency. Although outmuscled by politicians and lobbyists, scientists at the Earth Summit had plenty of reason to be concerned about our trajectory if things proceeded as usual.
A year later in Cambridge, England, at the First World Optimum Population Conference, Gretchen Daily and the Ehrlichs offered what they called a tentative, back-of-the-envelope calculation. They were not trying to pinpoint the end of human civilization, but rather to determine the opposite: how many humans could safely fit on the Earth without capsizing it?
Their presentation, twenty-five years after The Population Bomb was published, drew from a discussion of carrying capacity in Gretchen’s doctoral dissertation. Optimum population, they stated, did not mean the maximum number that could be crammed onto the planet like industrial chickens, but how many could live well without compromising the chance for future generations to do the same. At minimum, everyone should be guaranteed sustenance, shelter, education, health care, freedom from prejudice, and opportunities to earn a living.
That didn’t mean ending inequality. “While it is in nearly everyone’s selfish best interest to narrow the rich-poor gap, we are skeptical that the incentives driving social and economic inequalities can ever be fully overcome. We therefore think a global optimum should be determined with humanity’s characteristic selfishness and myopia in mind.”
Nor did they mean a pastoral, preindustrial existence. “[Optimum population] should be big enough to maintain human cultural diversity,” and in places dense enough to allow “a critical mass of intellectual, artistic, and technological creativity”—enough people to have “large, exciting cities and still maintain substantial tracts of wilderness.”
Yet it must be small enough to ensure that biodiversity is preserved. Their reasons were both practical—humans can’t live without the nourishment, air, materials, and water that nature provides—and moral:
“As the dominant species on the planet, we feel Homo sapiens should foster the continued existence of its only known living companions in the universe.”
To estimate optimum world population, they used a scenario developed by John Holdren. In that year, 1993, the planet’s 5½ billion people were consuming 13 terawatts—13 trillion watts—of human-generated energy. Nearly three-quarters of that were used by 1½ billion in industrialized countries, averaging 7½ kilowatts per person. If everyone used that much—in the developing world, the average was 1 kilowatt per person—and the world kept growing at the current pace, sometime in the twenty-first century there would be 14 billion humans and energy demand would be eight times higher.
Well before then, they feared, either oil or the ecosystem would collapse, or both. So Holdren had looked at what might be practical if everyone had equal access to energy. If demand averaged 3 kilowatts per capita (triple a poor person’s allotment; one-fourth what a typical American used, possibly achievable if energy efficiency were maximized), and if population growth rates eased enough to increase only to 10 billion,3 the total needed would still be 30 terawatts.4
Taking those figures, Daily and the Ehrlichs calculated backward. Since the 13 terawatts used in 1993 were already stripping the planet and scrambling atmospheric chemistry, they knew their total had to be lower. Assuming widespread adoption of clean technologies—some known, some yet to be developed—on the back of their envelope they hazarded a wild, wishful guess that it might be possible for the human race to use 9 terawatts every year without trashing the environment.
To allow for unforeseen consequences, which invariably accompany technologies, they proposed a 50 percent margin of error. That left 6 terawatts. From there, it was just a matter of long division.
The total number of people, each using 3 kilowatts of energy apiece, that could live in a world using no more than 6 terawatts was 2 billion.
Two billion was the population of the Earth in 1930, when the Haber-Bosch process had just become commercially available worldwide. Nearly everyone on Earth was still living off plants growing on sunlight, not fossil fuel. At 2 billion, the world’s population could be fed with little or no artificial fertilizer, relieving pressures on the soil, on downstream waters, and on the atmosphere: agricultural nitrogen is a major source of nitrous oxide, both a pollutant and the most potent greenhouse gas after CO2 and methane.
In 1930, the world’s 2 billion used just over 2 terawatts of energy annually: slightly more than 1 kilowatt per person. It was a world without television, computers, fewer automobiles per family, minimal appliances, and no jet air travel. By today’s living standards, an allotment of 1 kilowatt per person per year would mean we’d all be considered underdeveloped, an option desired by few beyond survivalists and some remaining hunter-gatherers.
The Ehrlichs and Daily acknowledged that it was unlikely that even their calculation, which would give each of us triple that amount, would be very appealing. So they offered another alternative: in a world of 1½ billion people, everyone could have 4¾ kilowatts. That figure, nearly two-thirds the per capita energy usage of rich countries, was feasible without any major technological breakthroughs, simply through better insulation, better gas mileage, and increased use of inexpensive solar water heaters.
They did not discuss how to bring the population back down to 1½ billion people—approximately the global population at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, one country had already embarked on a plan that, were the whole world to adopt it, within a century would bring the numbers back exactly to those of 1900. That was China, whose one-child policy was considered unacceptably brutal.
Neither the Ehrlichs, Gretchen Daily, nor nearly anyone else knew in 1993 that in an equally inscrutable, large country in another part of the world—a Muslim country—an alternative to China’s coercion was under way in which citizens would voluntarily reduce their high birth rate even faster than China, though years would have to pass before its extraordinary success would become apparent.
Two decades later, at eighty, Paul Ehrlich would still be presiding over Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. When asked why, he would reply, “To free up Gretchen Daily.” She was now the Center’s nominal director, winner of several of the world’s highest honors in science for her efforts to find a workable balance between people and nature.
To do that requires research into what species and ecosystems would continue to exist in the future. That raises a corollary, excruciating question, one that most scientists are loath to touch: Which species, from the perspectives of both science and human society, are so important that they and their habitats most merit protection?
To judge that a charismatic polar bear or cuddly panda is more significant than some inconspicuous brown bird hopping unnoticed on a forest floor, and therefore more crucial to save, is the ecological equivalent of Sophie’s Choice. No one, least of all Gretchen Daily, wants to make such a decision. Yet this is a world where many people are skeptical that species other than edible domestic animals are particularly important at all. Europeans, after all, are among the healthiest humans on Earth, despite having purged their continent of much if not most of its biodiversity. What is the justification for keeping every variety of flora, fauna, and mushroom intact—or what is the danger if we don’t?
This, Gretchen knew, was the tyranny of the Netherlands Fallacy: all Europeans were as dependent on a robust planet as any fisherman in the Philippines or hunter-gatherer in the Amazon. The resources that afforded Europe’s exalted standard of living came from farther away than Europeans could see, courtesy of all the imports their euros could buy. Rich countries fly high on the wings of distant lands that still have enough rivets in place.
Now, however, they were popping fast. Every decision of which rivet was more important than another was playing Russian roulette with the global biosphere. The truth that Gretchen Daily lived with was knowing that there will inevitably be a certain amount of Sophie’s Choice. “We can still bring a lot of life along with us,” she told her students. “But we can’t bring everything.”
No one knows which, or how many, are the essential minimum. Nevertheless, the ecologists’ job was to show that there are definitely some we can’t live without, such as pollinators and water conservers, and to help us realize that those species, in turn, can’t live without a habitat to sustain them.
As the years went by and the century turned, the estimate that Daily and the Ehrlichs had conjured from John Holdren’s energy arithmetic of how many humans the global habitat could safely sustain remained unchanged. No new technological miracle had stretched the planetary playing field.
All that did change was the number of players. There were 1½ billion more of us, all competing for space and sustenance with every other living thing.